Some Chord Progression Stuff

[rockstar_not]

This map has been very helpful to me lately to try out some more adventurous progressions - Which I discovered through the other thread:

http://www.chordmaps.com/genmap.htm


In fact, I have a copy now pasted to my keyboard stand for quick and handy reference.

I also like to noodle with Chordspace to try out some quick ideas.

-Scott

[Sascha Franck]

It's all major until I get up to that last one, and i'm not sure why it leads back to I so well, but it sounds wonderful to my ears. I know it is a major chord.

It's because it's a progression in A natural minor, which is the parallel minor tonality of C major.
The E chord is used as a "dominant" chord, to lead you back to the A minor - and, as you said by yourself, it's working nicely.
You could as well try with E minor, but you will most obviously notice it won't lead back to the A minor as nicely. The main reason probably being the way the G# resolves into the A.
This is exactly one of the reasons, why minor progressions are harder to deal with. You've got something which would entirely be covered in the key of C major (or A natural minor, for the matter), just that the dominant chord (regardless whether we're in a major or minor key) is usually working best with a major 3rd - so we need a more or less different set of notes (or a different scale, if you prefer) to just cover that single chord.

But, there's hope. As you already noticed by yourself, everything but the E is covered by A minor (which, again, is covered entirely by C major). So, the "least offensive strategy" in such a case would be to simply change the G to a G#. The resulting scale (in relation to A minor) would be A harmonic minor.
And fwiw, for chords, all that should be no problem. The only thing you need to remember is to change the G to a G#, as soon as it comes to the E chord (or one of its possible replacements, of which there are some).
Things are getting way more troublesome once you try to improvise over such progressions. All of a sudden you need two scales instead of one, just because there's that single, bloody dominant chord. Even worse in case you're playing guitar, as major scale fingerings are rather easy, whereas all the others just suck.

[BertKoor]

Speaking of creating my own personal chords..here is something I just missed with that sounds excellent to my ears.

I'll use numbers to show which chords I hit first.

1.A,C,E
2.G,B,D
3.F,A,C
4.E,G#,B

It's all major until I get up to that last one

Nope, the first one is A minor. The interval from A to C is three semi-tones: minor third. Major would be A C# E.

Second is G major, then F major and finally E minor. In short, it's a variation on the progression used in e.g. "hit the road jack" (last chord is major 7 instead of minor there.) And you'll find a pentatonic scale feels swell to improvise on that.

and i'm not sure why it leads back to I so well, but it sounds wonderful to my ears. I know it is a major chord.

If A is the root, E is fifth. That has a strong tendancy to go back to I (tonic.)

[robohoe]

Wow, great post, finally this stuff just got a little bit clearer. Thanks again.

[JumpingJackFlash]

Speaking of creating my own personal chords..here is something I just missed with that sounds excellent to my ears.

I'll use numbers to show which chords I hit first.

1.A,C,E
2.G,B,D
3.F,A,C
4.E,G#,B

It's all major until I get up to that last one

Nope, the first one is A minor. The interval from A to C is three semi-tones: minor third. Major would be A C# E.

Second is G major, then F major and finally E minor. In short, it's a variation on the progression used in e.g. "hit the road jack" (last chord is major 7 instead of minor there.) And you'll find a pentatonic scale feels swell to improvise on that.

Oops; the 4th is E major, not E minor (as I believe No name realised).
I think he meant 'it's all diatonic until I get up to that last one' (not major).

[Km7]

Note: There are some terminology differences. For example, in Bulgarian classical texts (and probably in German and Russian as well) A minor would be called the parallel minor of C major, while in other books (American?) it would be the relative minor of C major, in which case the parallel minor of C major is C minor.
It is good to have these things in mind.

[Sascha Franck]

Note: There are some terminology differences. For example, in Bulgarian classical texts (and probably in German and Russian as well) A minor would be called the parallel minor of C major, while in other books (American?) it would be the relative minor of C major, in which case the parallel minor of C major is C minor.
It is good to have these things in mind.

Oh, that's really interesting, because I'm already writing on my next post and will actually mention parallel minors indeed.
So, can someone confirm that in american terminology, parallel minor does indeed mean a minor chord of the same root?
I somewhat seem to remember something like this, but I'm really not sure...
And, as I'm from germany, I can confirm that over here we're saying parallel minor to, say, an Amin in the key of C.
Perhaps it's best to stick with "relative" minor then?

[Km7]

Well, I just said it. Berklee textbooks use this terminology as well.
Also, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_key
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_key
One could also make a search for "parallel minor" and "relative minor" in Google.

[JumpingJackFlash]

Oh, that's really interesting, because I'm already writing on my next post and will actually mention parallel minors indeed.
So, can someone confirm that in american terminology, parallel minor does indeed mean a minor chord of the same root?
I somewhat seem to remember something like this, but I'm really not sure...
And, as I'm from germany, I can confirm that over here we're saying parallel minor to, say, an Amin in the key of C.
Perhaps it's best to stick with "relative" minor then?

Personally, I prefer the term 'tonic minor' or when referring to the minor on the same note, then there is no ambiguity.
(In the UK, we use 'relative minor' for scales that share the same key signature).

[mayan]

man, sascha...you are a freakin' treasure! Thanks!

[Sascha Franck]

Thanks Varadin and Jack. I will correct my next post and just use "relative" for now.

[Sascha Franck]

Allright, I'd like to continue with some examples.

Let's talk about the most important chord movements in western music - for now, I prefer the term "movement" over progression, as I will try to look at small portions of what might become a larger progression in the end.

But, a little side information first, to get some commonly used conventions sort of done:
Usually, our I chord is called "tonic", the IV chord is called "subdominant" and the V chord is called "dominant". This also applies to minor progressions. Most often, using the term dominant implies it's a major chord, often "enhanced" with a 7th.

When dealing with major scales, we also have some "relative" chords to those "elemental" functional chords, they're usually just called "relative minor".
So there's a relative minor chord for the tonic (the VImin(7) chord, in the key of C that'd be Amin(7)), for the subdominant (the IImin(7) chord, in C that'd be Dmin(7)) and for the dominant chord (the IIImin(7), in C that'd be Emin(7)).
These chords are more or less closely related to their relative major chords, so quite sometimes they are exchangeable - without changing the "basic" function of whatever progression we're dealing with (this is especially true for the relative minor of the tonic and for the relative minor of the subdominant, for the dominant chord it often doesn't apply too well).

Sidenote: I just changed the term "parallel" to "relative". In germany (and apparently other countries) we say "parallel" minor, but it seems that this might be confusing for some other folks. Thanks to Varadin for bringing this up!

I won't exactly start using those relative chords in the first examples, but getting this sort of terminology cleared already might help us along later on.

Ok, if there's something like the most famous chord movement ever, it's got to be the movement between the I and V chord and back. Actually, the move from V to I is the important part of this.
It's probably related to the extremely "pleasant" experience we get from the 3rd of the dominant (V) chord resolving into the root of the tonic (I) chord.
Example: In the key of C, the third of our dominant chord G, which would be the B, is happily resolving into the C.
In addition, dominant chords are often treated as 7th chords, and that 7th is as well resolving nicely to the 3rd of the tonic chord.
Example: In the key of C, the 7th of our dominant chord G7, which would be the F, is happily resolving into the E, which would be the 3rd of our C chord.

Alright, how does this movement sound?
You could of course just try by yourself, but I'm gonna post some audio examples as well.
To my ears, if not used in a classical setup, the I-V-I (or whatever combination of the two) movement tends to sound "folk-ish" or "country-ish" or whatever you may call it.
Not necessarily bad, but for some things it might sound too obvious, or too tame - whatever.
Making use of that particular movement as a part of a larger progression is however making a lot of sense in many cases, because, if one thing's for sure, it's that this particular movement is sounding "plausible" to our western ears.
Anyways, here's a sort of "country-latin-ish" thing using just the very two chords isolated. It's in the key of F, so the chords used are F and C (the guitar is occasionally introducing a 7th on the C chord).
http://home.arcor.de/s.franck/chordprog ... -V-V-I.mp3
Ok, this is probably not exactly sounding like your next megaseller (sorry for the rather sloppy performance, btw), but IMO it sort of describes the "character" of the used I-V-V-I movement.

I will finish this post for now, with another one probably coming in a bit. It'll deal with some more chords and it'll also deal with how to probably "expand" a simple progression such as I-V-I.

[dreamkeeper]

Great stuff, Sascha!

http://home.arcor.de/s.franck/chordprog ... -V-V-I.mp3

Hm, could you expand a bit on how you were turning such a simple progression into such a beautiful piece of music? I think what us noobs are struggling with most, is not so much the basic structure of things but the balance of all these elements, nice additions and small variations that you pros are achieving in a kinda natural way. That is, us noobs could play just the same progressions and it might (in my case anyway ) sound like shit! When I had piano lessons, I experienced this about every time: my teacher would sit down and play exactly the same basic chords and it would sound beautiful - somehow frustrating

Now, it's perfectly clear that this doesn't come overnight. So practice! practice! practice! and practice some more... However, it'd be nice if you could tell us a little bit about the techniques you used in this example, i.e. all those small variations that you're injecting probably intuitively (because of huge experience and great chops) to make it interesting and pleasant. And how did you achieve that latin-caribbean vibe?

I guess I sound like a complete idiot

werner

[No name]

This map has been very helpful to me lately to try out some more adventurous progressions - Which I discovered through the other thread:

http://www.chordmaps.com/genmap.htm


In fact, I have a copy now pasted to my keyboard stand for quick and handy reference.

I also like to noodle with Chordspace to try out some quick ideas.

-Scott

Thanks for bringing this up! I read about this and meant to ask about it, but forgot. This should actually be very helpful to me. Thanks.

[Sascha Franck]

Hm, could you expand a bit on how you were turning such a simple progression into such a beautiful piece of music?

Thanks for the compliment, but it's been really easy on that example (wouldn't happen to know whether "beautiful" applies, but anyways...).
At first I just thought I'd record the plain chords (with a bassnote below them). And that's still what the epiano is doing. Plain whole notes. After that I've been noodling with some triad inversions (that's why I stressed the importance of them in my first post) on the guitar. In the end, I used more 6ths than triads, but that's been merely caused by the playing style (almost all of the used 6ths are subsets of triad inversions anyways). And then I just thought a latin beat would be better than, say, a country beat. Found some in my loop library. And in the end I added a slightly modified salsa bass pattern (the most often used salsa bass pattern is happening on beats "2+" and "4", but for whatever reasons I used beats "3" and "4" alternating with the standard pattern on this, maybe my playing was just sloppy...).
That's about it, really.
As far as the carribean vibe goes, that's entirely up to the loop (came with an old version of Samplitude and I recycled it, at least that's what I seem to remember) and the bass pattern I used.

Of course, the guitar noodling is based quite a bit on experience and a certain amount of practice (I had to play similar guitars in similar contexts before). The rest isn't - at least not much.